DALLAS
– The Dallas County Commissioners Court voted 3-2 along party lines
Tuesday to approve medical benefits for domestic partnerships.

The approval provides the money for couples who aren't married, be they gay or straight. It's an issue guaranteed to divide.

“There
is simply no place for pernicious partisanship when it comes to
equality," argued Rafael McDonnell of the Resource Center Dallas,
speaking in favor of the proposed stipend for domestic partners. Others took the podium to argue against it.

"This
is utterly ridiculous and totally irresponsible position on your part,”
said Dallas resident Debbie Morozzo. “This is a waste of taxpayers’
money."

The issue is whether Dallas County should provide a
stipend of up to $295 per year for county employees' domestic partners
who otherwise would not qualify for medical benefits. The three
Democrats on the commission favored the move while the two Republicans
were opposed.

by George LakoffPublished on Tuesday, October 30, 2012 by Common DreamsYes,
global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy — and the Midwest
droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme
weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud, it was
causation, systemic causation.

Systemic causation is familiar.
Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of
AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease.
Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without
contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.

There
is a difference between systemic and direct causation. Punching someone
in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is
direct causation. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is
direct causation. Slicing bread is direct causation. Stealing your
wallet is direct causation. Any application of force to something or
someone that always produces an immediate change to that thing or person
is direct causation. When causation is direct, the word cause is
unproblematic.

Systemic causation, because it is less obvious, is
more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of
multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be
indirect, working through a network of more direct causes. It may be
probabilistic, occurring with a significantly high probability. It may
require a feedback mechanism. In general, causation in ecosystems,
biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be
direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation,
it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its
negative effects controlled.

This
week, our nation has anxiously watched as Hurricane Sandy lashed the
East Coast and caused widespread damage--affecting millions. Now more
than ever, our neighbors need our help. Please consider donating or
volunteering for your local aid organizations.

The images of
Sandy’s flooding brought back memories of a similar--albeit smaller
scale-- event in Nashville just two years ago. There, unprecedented
rainfall caused widespread flooding, wreaking havoc and submerging
sections of my hometown. For me, the Nashville flood was a milestone.
For many, Hurricane Sandy may prove to be a similar event: a time when
the climate crisis—which is often sequestered to the far reaches of our
everyday awareness became a reality.

While the storm that
drenched Nashville was not a tropical cyclone like Hurricane Sandy, both
storms were strengthened by the climate crisis. Scientists tell us that
by continually dumping 90 million tons of global warming pollution into
the atmosphere every single day, we are altering the environment in
which all storms develop. As the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm,
storms are becoming more energetic and powerful. Hurricane Sandy, and
the Nashville flood, were reminders of just that. Other climate-related
catastrophes around the world have carried the same message to hundreds
of millions.

Sandy was also affected by other symptoms of the
climate crisis. As the hurricane approached the East Coast, it gathered
strength from abnormally warm coastal waters. At the same time, Sandy's
storm surge was worsened by a century of sea level rise. Scientists tell
us that if we do not reduce our emissions, these problems will only
grow worse.

Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to
come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate
crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather.

Liberals
question why poor voters who use public assistance still vote for
Republicans who want to cut those very services. The real story, Gary Younge finds, is much more complicated

Tracey
Owings is fighting hard to keep the home that has been in his family
for 34 years. In 2000 his mother refinanced. In 2006 she died. In 2009
he lost his job and had no paid work for nine months. He fell behind
with the mortgage. The bank moved to foreclose on the house. Gradually
the work came back. Less than before. Much less. But just enough. The
house is not in negative equity and now he can make the payments. But he
can't get the bank to take his money. Attempts to modify the loan and
take advantage of a settlement, brokered by the White House, between
mortgage companies and the justice department have come to nought. "I
don't qualify," he says with exasperation detailing both his efforts to
meet each bureaucratic challenge and his frustration at each
bureaucratic obstacle.

He stands in the waiting room of Gulfcoast
Legal Services offices in Sarasota with an armful of documents and a
belly full of bile. "They have failed me," he says. "Obama came in
offering hope and change but he's failed. I just want to save my
mother's house."

Owings is voting for Mitt Romney. Does he think Romney will improve his lot? "I'm willing to try anything at this point," he says.

There is nothing more vexing to liberals than poor Republicans.
Their very existence rankles. It turns their world on its head and
their assumptions inside out. The effort to explain them is understood
not just as a political paradox but a psychological disorder. They have
been duped. They must have been. How else would one explain putting your
cross next to the man who derided them as "victims" among the 47% "I don't worry about".
To many liberals these are turkeys voting for Christmas or lemmings off
for a leap; the condemned tying the noose for their own execution.

At
times the contradictions are striking. In August 2009, when opponents
of Obamacare were disrupting town hall meetings with claims of death
panels, Kenneth Gladney and other members of St Louis tea party got into
a fight with Democrats
at a public meeting. He had to go to the emergency room with injuries
to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face and ended up in a
wheelchair. It turned out Gladney, who had recently been laid off, had no health insurance. He appealed for donations.

Trace a map
highlighting government dependency and those most reliant on benefits
live in Republican states and often Republican counties. In Floyd county
in Eastern Kentucky, 40% of the income comes from the government. In
2008 Floyd, where almost 20% live below the poverty line and the median
income is almost 20% lower than the country, voted for McCain – a 27
point swing against the Democrats and the first victory for Republicans
in living memory.

Democrats
lose a key demographic, and maybe an election, because they're
unwilling to support values issues that they could very plausibly
endorse.

A presidential election focused on income and wealth
inequality? The Republicans clearly identified as the party of the
rich, and the Democrats, just as clearly, the party of the rest of us?
That's pretty amazing. We haven't had a contest like this in
three-quarters of a century.

But if the voters really care so much
about economic issues, as the pundits keep insisting, and inequality
really is such a prominent issue, then the Democrats should be breezing
to victory. So why are they clearly losing the House and facing a very real possibility of losing the White House?

My answer unfolds in two connected parts: First, the economy is not the most basic issue. Second, this year as always, the foolish Democrats are acting as if it is.

Part One: It's Not About "The Economy, Stupid."

Voters
are not basing their decision primarily on the unemployment rate and
the performance of the economy. When you look at the polls, as The New
York Times reported,
"disaffection with the economy didn't translate into support for Mr.
Romney." In fact, those who suffer most when jobs disappear - the poor,
single women, people of color - are most likely to support Obama. Those
who suffer least - the white, the married, the rich and solidly
middle-class - are the only groups giving Romney a majority of their
votes.

The states with the highest unemployment rates
(California, Rhode Island) are solidly blue; the states with the least
unemployment (North Dakota, Nebraska) are solidly red. If this were
simply a referendum on Obama's economic stewardship, the polling data
should be exactly the other way around.

Like
many others—though not the weather forecasters or the political
authorities—I underestimated the scope of the storm. Now that at least
thirty-eight people are dead, thousands have been driven from their
homes, and millions are without power, the election campaign looks like
something of a side show. But the fact remains that voting will go ahead
next Tuesday, and the politicking continues, albeit in a different
manner.

On the Democratic side, the
devastation that Sandy has wreaked more than justifies President Obama’s
decision to return to Washington on Sunday and to declare a
pre-disaster state of emergency in a number of states. On Tuesday
morning, he followed up these edicts by signing major disaster
declarations for New York and New Jersey, which will make it easier for
them to access federal assistance. First thing this morning, the White
House let it be known
that the President had been monitoring the storm’s progress throughout
the night, and that he had spoken to a number of local officials,
including Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bloomberg, and Chris Christie, the
governor of New Jersey.

Appearing on the networks this morning,
Christie, for the third day in a row, heaped praise on Obama’s handling
of the storm. “The President has been outstanding in this,” he told the
“Today” show. On “Morning Joe,” he said, “It’s been very good working
with the President. He and his Administration have been coördinating
with us. It’s been wonderful.” Speaking on CNN, Christie said that he
had been mightily impressed by Obama’s accessibility throughout the
crisis. “He gave me his number at the White House, told me to call him
if I needed anything, and he absolutely means it.” Christie also pointed
out that Obama didn’t once bring up politics in their conversations,
and added, “If he’s not bringing it up, you can be sure that people in
New Jersey are not worried about that, primarily if one of the guys
running isn’t.”

Michael Brown need to learn to shut the fuck up so people won't
notice what a moron he is. With out rich white boy affirmative action
this idiot would be working in the rapid food deployment industry or as a
janitor in a pig farm.

Michael Brown, the former FEMA director infamously praised by President George W. Bush for doing a "heckuva job"
during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, told a local paper
that President Barack Obama acted too quickly in mobilizing relief for
Superstorm Sandy.

"Here's my concern," Brown told Denver's Westword
on Monday, suggesting that the official response was actually making
people complacent. "It's premature [when] the brunt of the storm won't
happen until later this afternoon."

Obama declared states of emergency
all along East Coast states in the path of Sandy on Sunday, well before
the storm hit, allowing federal resources to start flowing where
governors thought they would be needed. FEMA and local responders were
able to pre-position a lot of the material being drawn upon now.Obama also held a press conference warning people to pay careful attention to the storm.

"This
is a serious and big storm," Obama said after meeting with FEMA
officials and talking to governors Sunday. "And my first message is to
all the people across the Eastern seaboard, Mid-Atlantic, going north,
that you need to take this very seriously."

Hurricane
Sandy is still making its impact felt around the United States. But
that’s not stopping right-wingers and foes of government from hammering
away at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).They have a
tough case to make, though--even GOP favorite Chris Christie, the
governor of New Jersey, praised FEMA’s performance. “I have to say, the
administration, the president, himself and FEMA Administrator Craig
Fugate have been outstanding with us so far,” Christie told ABC News. As Hurricane Sandy was ripping its way through the U.S., Republican strategist Ron Bonjean took to CNN to knock FEMA, as Raw Story pointed out .
“Most people don’t have a positive impression of FEMA,” said Bonjean.
“I think Mitt Romney was right on the button.” Bonjean was referring to
remarks made by Romney at a GOP primary debate that have sparked
criticism.

“Every time you have an occasion to take something from
the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right
direction,” said Romney in answering a question about the role of the
federal government in disaster relief. He added, “if you can go even
further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better.” In
practice, this would mean that FEMA’s role would be greatly diminished,
or taken out altogether if Romney succeeded in privatizing disaster
relief. Vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget would also hit
FEMA hard.

Romney’s remarks at the debate last year have become a
lightning rod for critics of the Republican ticket--so much so that the
Romney campaign stressed that their candidate would not abolish FEMA.
Still, the Romney camp did stick to its guns on the issue of giving
states more responsibility for disaster relief.

“Gov. Romney
believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in
responding to storms and other natural disasters in their
jurisdictions,” said Romney campaign spokesperson Ryan Williams, according to Politico.
"As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid
affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and
assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the
federal government and FEMA.” A “campaign official added that Romney
would not abolish FEMA,” Politico reports.

Romney’s call to diminish the role of FEMA was supported by J.D. Tuccille ,
a writer for the libertarian Reason.com site. Tuccille called for
“tak[ing] the job” of “disaster coordination” by the federal government
away to “let people who know what they're doing handle the heavy
lifting.”

Ten years ago Global Warming was the subject of a slide show by Al Gore, the man the Supreme Court stole the Presidency from.Tina and I saw the lecture when it became a documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.I
had been interested in nature and the environment from the time I was a
young child growing up among the mountains and lakes, hills and streams
of the Adirondacks. Along with the forts and the history was the
beauty of the mountains and the pollution produced by the mines and
paper mills.

Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring came out the same fall as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That was fifty years ago.It was the height of the Civil rights Movement. I had just admitted I was transsexual to my parents.The left wing peace movement, became my cause. Folkies and hippies, poets and bohemians became my family.A few years later the Ecology Movement was born, I saw Yosemite and read, the books of Edward Abbey.
But over the years I've met too many cult mind fuckers, too many people
who peddle homeopathy, crystals, Rekei and astrology to not be
skeptical.So I read and examined what was happening in the world. I read James Hansen and Bill McKibben and dozens of others.You want to know something. Those of us who have been hippie punched and called names for the last fifty years were right.Now
we have a storm that is like something out of a dystopian disaster film
destroying New York, one of my favorite cities in this country, a city
of incredible creativity and yes commerce too.

It was a city I
first escaped to when I was trying my wings, I eventually chose San
Francisco but the lessons I learned on Bleeker and Macdougal, Washington Square and the East Village were the lessons I needed to fly.When
I lived out on the Island ten years ago I was almost afraid to go to
the city by myself, but when I went it was like visiting home. The
streets and subways embraced me, the hotdog venders smiled at me the
Strand book store near Union Square welcomed me.I know New
York will come back, it's a tough city and the people are strong people
with big hearts but it saddens me to watch this disaster happening.

But it's the subways I keep
coming back to, trying to see in my mind's eye what must be a dark,
scary struggle to keep them from filling with water.
The tide at the Battery has surged feet beyond the old record; water
must be pouring into every entrance and vent – I hope some brave
reporter is chronicling this fight, and will someday name its heroes.

For me, the subways are New York, or at least they're the most crucial element of that magnificent ecosystem. When I was a young Talk of the Town reporter at the New Yorker,
I spent five years exploring the city, always by subway. This was in
the 1980s, at the city's nadir – the graffiti-covered trains would pause
for half an hour in mid-flight; the tinny speakers would reduce the
explanation of the trouble to gibberish.It was how I traveled,
though – I didn't even know how to hail a cab. For a dollar, you could
go anywhere. And my boast was that I'd gotten out at every station in
the system for some story or another. It may not have been quite true:
the Bronx is a big and forgotten place, and Queens stretches out forever
– but it was my aspiration.

If
you’re like me and reside in the Metropolitan area, you’re not really
accustomed to dealing with behemoth hurricanes, especially not at the
end of October. One can only conclude that climate change and the
Republican party’s reluctance to accept the worldwide scientific
consensus of its existence, whoring themselves to the coal and big oil
and thus refusing to effectuate any of the necessary recommendations to
lessening its impact, is responsible for Hurricane Sandy.
“Freak” formation, “unprecedented and bizarre,” and a “frankenstorm” that could cause historic storm surges, last for multiple days, and cause over a billion dollars in damage is the foreboding and dire language being used by meteorologists. And Bryan Norcross, a chief hurricane analyst, described the storm this way on his facebook page:

Since
bat-shit crazy is today’s new moderately intelligent in the GOP and
they think that “global warming’ is simply god’s morning breath or a
Hollywood invention, they downright refuse to acknowledge our climate
system is breaking innumerable records at an unnatural
pace, including thermal expansion creating greater and stronger
Hurricanes like Sandy and stronger snowstorms like Snowpocalyspe in New
York City and NJ in the winter of 2011.Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, concludes that all superstorms “are affected by climate change.”

“The
air is on average warmer and moister than it was prior to about 1970
and in turn has likely led to a 5–10 % effect on precipitation and
storms that is greatly amplified in extremes. The warm moist air is
readily advected onto land and caught up in weather systems as part of
the hydrological cycle, where it contributes to more intense
precipitation events that are widely observed to be occurring,” according to Trenberth. (Think Progress)

But
the modern-day Republican party and their radical austerity policies
(big government for the wealthy, Somalia sized government for the rest),
including Mitt Romney stating he wants to make major cuts to FEMA–the
very organization that helps states like his political buddy Chris
Christie’s handle the destruction from major storms– and Captain
Capitalist playing to the knuckle-dragging (maybe not since they
don’t believe in evolution), mouth-foaming crazies in the tea party by
cynically mocking President Obama’s pledge to
deal with climate change and “slow the rise of the oceans” at the
Republican National Convention in Tampa , apparently think
that their car elevators will protect them from the inevitable damage of
climate change. Worse yet, the very crucial debate on climate change
and the candidates solutions to dealing with it was conspicuously absent
from all three of the presidential debates, which evidently is the
first time since 1988. In the mean time, the rest of us may not exactly
have the luxury to stay at our chalets in Aspen until the hurricane
blows over, or escape to our $12 million homes in La Jolla
when the power goes out indefinitely. Rest assure that so long as
the corporations are buying the best politicians money can buy, we will
never have a meaningful debate or sound solutions to the destructive
factors of climate change. Alas, we’ll just hear more about the need for
such hilarious oxymorons as clean coal, which is like soft-core porn in
that it’s still dirty but not that as many people are getting screwed.
Stay safe.Continue reading at: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/10/29/experts-concur-climate-change-responsible-for-frankenstorm/

NEW YORK -– With the presidential candidates grounded and news networks intensely focused on Hurricane Sandy, some suggested Monday that climate change and global warming -- issues that were neglected
during the presidential debates and that received scant coverage
throughout the 2012 race -- could finally be pushed to the forefront.

Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf wrote
that "Sandy will do more to draw attention to issues of climate change
than all the candidates running for every office in the United States
during this election cycle have done." And The New Yorker's Elizabeth
Kolbert wrote that "Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque."

Although
Rothkopf and Kolbert each cautioned against attributing a single
weather event –- even one as unusual as the oft-dubbed "Frankenstorm" –-
directly to climate change, they and others
have pointed out that warmer water temperatures and such extreme
weather suggest a connection. "Some evidence that warming seas lead to
worse hurricanes, so let's hope Sandy reminds us of risks of climate
change," tweeted New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who later sent his 1.3 million followers a link to the site Hurricane Sandy Speaks.

But
while Sandy on Monday made many consider the potential dangers of
global climate change -- especially online and on Twitter -- such
concerns didn't get similar attention on the cable networks that were
covering the hurricane non-stop.

CNN began its rolling coverage of Hurricane Sandy at 4:30 a.m. and dispatched
around 30 correspondents and anchors throughout the storm's path. While
CNN staffers braved harsh winds and rain for live shots on the beach or flooded streets,
the network's anchors and correspondents hadn't mentioned "climate
change" or "global warming" once by 4:30 p.m., according to a search
using television monitoring service TVEyes.

You would think these fuck would die from the load of weapons grade bullshit they contain. These
fuck are too stupid to believe in science, evolution or climate change
even though they can see the latter happening right before their moronic
eyes yet they feel free to spew their homophobic crap like it was some
pearl of wisdom.Time to tax the churches and so called ministers.Time to treat religion like the superstitious pile of bullshit it is.From Gay Star News: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/christian-preacher-blames-gays-hurricane-sandy291012Chaplain John McTernan has said God's judgment of gays caused the hurricane nearing the east coast of the United States

As
the east coast of the United States prepares for the storm, which has
already killed 60 people in the Caribbean, author and chaplain John
McTernan has decided who is at fault.

On his website Defend Proclaim The Faith,
the preacher says the gathering storm must be God’s judgment on gays,
and punishing the president Barack Obama for coming out in support of
marriage equality.He believes ever since George Bush Sr signed
the Madrid Peace Process to divide the land of Israel in 1991, ‘America
has been under God’s judgment since this event.’

McTernan said: ‘Obama is 100% behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem.

‘Both
candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda.
America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!’

His reasoning for this is that it has been 21 years since the ‘perfect storm’ of October 1991.

Sandy,
the hurricane that appears set to pummel the East Coast, promises a
historic potential for damage and a terrifying look at what may be in
store for us—ever more frequent assaults of not-so-natural origin.

Watching Sandy
on her careening path toward the Eastern Seaboard scares me more than
it would have 15 months ago. That’s because my home state took the brunt
of Irene,
last year’s “sprawling,” “surly,” “record-breaking” Atlantic storm. I
know now exactly how much power a warm sea can contain and how far that
pain can spread.

And in the process, feeling that fear,
I begin to sense what the future may be like, as more and more of the
world finds itself facing ever-more-frequent assaults from the amped-up
forces of the not-so-natural world.

You can’t, as the
climate-change deniers love to say, blame any particular hurricane on
global warming. They’re born, as they always have been, when a tropical
wave launches off the African coast and heads out into the open ocean.
But when that ocean is hot—and at the moment sea surface temperatures
off the Northeast are five degrees higher than normal—a storm like Sandy
can lurch north longer and stronger, drawing huge quantities of
moisture into its clouds, and then dumping them ashore.

Last
year that dumping happened across Vermont. In some places we broke
absolutely every rainfall record. It turned our streams and rivers into
cataracts that took out 500 miles of state highway. A dozen towns were
left completely cut off from the rest of the world, relying on
helicopters to drop food. I know the odds are slim that we’ll find
ourselves in the bull’s-eye again. But someone will.

This
time the great damage may be along the coast. Even as we’ve built up
our coastal populations, sea level has begun to climb. There are already
cities along the coast that flood easily at the month’s high tide. This
storm may hit when the moon is full, and it may dump so much rain that
the water will be coming from both directions. Or maybe across the
Appalachian highlands will be where it does its biggest damage, mixing
with an inland storm front to dump snow on forests still in leaf. But
someplace is going to take it on the chin, maybe harder than it ever has
before.

And that’s the world we live in now. James
Hansen, the NASA climatologist, published a paper earlier this year
showing how the seemingly small one degree we’ve already warmed the
earth has made extreme weather far more likely. The insurance industry
has published a series of warnings in recent years saying the same
thing. The world grows steadily more unpredictable, and hence we grow
less comfortable in it.

Back
when he was being “severely conservative,” Mitt Romney suggested that
responsibility for disaster relief should be taken from the big, bad
federal government and given to the states, or perhaps even privatized.
Hurricane Sandy would like to know if he’d care to reconsider.

The
absurd—and dangerous—policy prescription came in a GOP primary debate
in June. Moderator John King said he had recently visited communities
affected by severe weather, and noted that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency “is about to run out of money.”

“There are some
people ... who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that
the states should take on more of this role,” King said. “How do you
deal with something like that?”

Romney replied: “Absolutely. Every
time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government
and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you
can go further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even
better.”

Romney went on to express the general principle that,
given the crushing national debt, “we should take all of what we’re
doing at the federal level and say, ‘What are the things we’re doing
that we don’t have to do?’”King gave him a chance to back off: “Including disaster relief, though?”

Romney
didn’t blink. “We cannot—we cannot afford to do those things without
jeopardizing the future for our kids,” he said, adding that “it is
simply immoral ... to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on
to our kids.”

Now, with an unprecedented and monstrous storm
bashing the East Coast, this glib exercise in ideological purity is
newly relevant. Was Romney really saying that the federal government
should abdicate the task of responding to natural disasters such as the
one now taking place? Yes, he was. Did he really mean it? Well, with
Romney, that’s always another question.

by Jamie HennPublished on Monday, October 29, 2012 by Common DreamsA big crowd of volunteers joined 350.org in Times Square on Sunday to unfurl a giant parachute with the message “End Climate Silence” and an image of a hurricane.

"Meteorologists
have called this 'the biggest storm ever to hit the U.S. mainland,'
which is a reminder of how odd our weather has been in this hottest year
in American history,” said 350.org founder Bill McKibben. “But mainly
it's a reminder of how much we need to take care of each other when
disaster strikes--we hope everyone will pitch in with the Red Cross, and
with local relief efforts. Community is our greatest source of energy,
and our cleanest!"

As Hurricane Sandy barrels down on the East
Coast, scientists are connecting the dots between increasingly extreme
weather and global warming. Yet for most of this year’s presidential
election, the words “climate change” have gone unmentioned. The issue
was not raised in a presidential debate for the first time since 1988.

Scientists
warn that climate change is loading the dice for extreme weather events
like Hurricane Sandy. The Earth’s average global temperature has risen
between 1.5 and 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century and the
warmer temperatures mean that the atmosphere holds about 4% more
moisture than it did in 1970, leading to greater rainfall.

An
exorcism can be an exciting thing to watch. No doubt, like many
spiritual experiences, it is a phenomenon that taps into intense
psychological manipulations to produce a result that can be traumatic
both mentally and physically, making it jarring to witness. Because many
conservative Christians believe that homosexuality is an abomination,
some extreme believers will use exorcism to try to expel the gay “demon”
from an individual. These sensationalized experiences serve as juicy
bait for both viral videos as well as daytime talk-show intrigue. An
abridged clip of Reverent Bob Larson exorcising a gay man — then selling
his services — is making such rounds on the internet this week:

A similar, more timely, video went viral in 2009 when a Connecticut church tried to exorcise a young gay man, so traumatizing him that he writhed on the floor, seeming to seize and even vomit. Conservatives defended the church, and its leader even had to take to CNN to defend her religious practices. A few months later, the teenage victim appeared on Tyra, proclaiming that the exorcism had worked and he was now ex-gay.

There’s
no doubt that exorcisms are dangerous and harmful, bordering on
brainwashing as religious leaders stigmatize young gay people to their
very cores. But because of how extreme — and for many viewers, so absurd
as to be ridiculous — this phenomenon is, it desensitizes the public to
the much more common and just-as-harmful practices of ex-gay therapy.

Often,
ex-gay therapy is treated in both LGBT and mainstream media as somewhat
fringe and perhaps even discountable. When a controversy erupts, like
California’s recently passed law to ban ex-gay therapy for minors, the
practice is acknowledged for a moment, then allowed to fade back into
obscurity with the assumption that no one really believes something as
silly as changing a person’s sexual orientation. But even though the
number of people promoting ex-gay therapy may be low, the number of
people who believe in it is much higher. The most prominent anti-gay
organizations, including the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and even the National Organization for Marriage have all defended the practice and testified to its viability.

The man who has stoked fear about impostors at the polls.

Teresa
Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family
house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly
thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every
Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated
when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections
arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes
Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely
contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever
won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack
Obama and Mitt Romney almost even in the state. Every vote may matter,
including those cast by the seven members of the Sharp family—Teresa,
her husband, four grown children, and an elderly aunt—living in the
Millsdale Street house.

The letter, which cited arcane legal
statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September
4th. “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been
challenged by a qualified elector,” it said. “The Hamilton County Board
of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on
Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 A.M. . . . You have the right to
appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.”

“My
first thought was, Oh, no!” Sharp, who is African-American, said. “They
ain’t messing with us poor black folks! Who is challenging my right to
vote?”

The answer to Sharp’s question is that a new watchdog
group, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, which polices
voter-registration rolls in search of “electoral irregularities,” raised
questions about her eligibility after consulting a government-compiled
list of local properties and mistakenly identifying her house as a
vacant lot.

The Sharp household had first been identified as
suspicious by computer software that had been provided to the Ohio Voter
Integrity Project by a national organization called True the Vote. The
software, which has been distributed to similar groups around the
country, is used to flag certain households, including those with six or
more registered voters. This approach inevitably pinpoints many
lower-income residents, students, and extended families.

Republicans passed new voting restrictions
in more than a dozen states since the 2010 election that were
purportedly designed to stop voter fraud. Yet, in a deeply ironic twist,
the most high-profile instances of election fraud this cycle have been
committed by Republicans in states with new voting restrictions.

The RNC-funded Strategic Allied Consulting,
run by checkered GOP operative Nathan Sproul, is under criminal
investigation in Florida for submitting fraudulent voter registration
forms to election officials. (Sproul is still running voter-canvassing operations for conservatives in thirty states.) Sproul’s associate Colin Small,
who had worked for Strategic Allied Consulting and as “Grassroots Field
Director at the Republican National Committee,” was charged last week
with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors for trashing voter
registration forms in Virginia.

Republicans claim that the voter
registration fraud was committed by a few bad apples and pales in
comparison to the fraud committed by ACORN in 2008. But ACORN was never
funded by the DNC. And the abuses committed by Sproul and Small were far
worse than those attached to ACORN. Unlike Strategic Allied Consulting,
ACORN never changed the party affiliations on fraudulent voter
registration forms and self-reported suspicious materials to election
officials. Nor did ACORN ever destroy valid voter registration forms, as
Small is accused of doing. (Not to mention that none of the fictitious
characters falsely registered by ACORN workers, like Mickey Mouse, ever voted.)

Despite the right’s preoccupation with voter fraud,
Sproul and Small have received scant coverage from conservative media
outlets. Fox News, which ran 122 stories on ACORN from 2007–08,
mentioned Strategic Allied Consulting only three times since the scandal
broke in late September and hasn’t aired a single report on voter
registration fraud in Virginia. Nor have National Review or The Weekly Standard, the pre-eminent conservative magazines, run an article about either case.

Apple leads the consumer electronics business in enslaving us to the idea that we must have the latest device. But must we?

The
comedian Louis CK had a wonderful routine called "Everything's amazing
and nobody's happy," in which he satirized our modern exasperation with
pocket-sized gadgets that, a few years back, would have been considered
powerful enough to send a man into space, or at least run a
modestly-sized corporation.

"Uh," he mocks one clueless citizen shaking her smartphone, which is taking time to load, "It won't … uh!"Louis CK comes back with a roaring rejoinder:

"Give
it a second! It's going to space! Can you give it a second to get back
from space? Is the speed of light too slow for you?"

His searing conclusion is clear:

"We live in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots."

Louis
CK delivered his routine years ago, but it has remained exceptionally
relevant – particularly in a week such as this, when Apple is announcing several new products of overlapping abilities. The iPod touch, the iPad mini – all at exorbitant prices, while Microsoftintroduces its new tablet, the Surface, and Android fans spar over whether it's worth it to buy a Galaxy phone now or wait for the next Nexus to manifest.

But as more consumers obsess this season about the iPad mini and the new iPod touch, and whether the Google Nexus tablet is superior to the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, and the virtues of the iPhone 5's lightning connector versus the old iPhone
4s connector that predated it by less than a year, it's a good time to
step back and wonder how we have come to this pass. These devices, as
fragile as Faberge eggs, packaged like jewels – and priced accordingly –
have become, in many minds, almost immediately disposable as soon as
the next device with retina-display resolution makes us salivate for the
next big thing.

From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/28by Jim GoodmanPublished on Sunday, October 28, 2012 by Common DreamsI've
farmed all my life and I have to tell you, all food is not the same. No
food or farming system is perfect, but as farmers, as citizens, we
should not be forced to accept a globalized, industrialized, genetically
modified system of agricultural production.

I have farmed with
pesticides, chemical fertilizers and livestock hormones, and was lucky
enough to jump off that ship before it went completely under the waves. I
experienced the shortcomings and failures of pesticides, antibiotics
and the system in general. I was concerned for the health of my family,
my livestock and the soil, so I got out.

I dropped out of the
conventional farming system (seeing organic production as a better,
safer and more productive alternative) just as the revolution of genetic
modification (GM) and its “promise” to feed the world was being forced
upon the world.

When I say forced, I mean just that.

People were never given a choice (not in the U.S. anyway) as to whether
or not their food would contain GM ingredients, or if they had a right
to know. If you eat food with processed ingredients, you are eating GM
ingredients.

Despite clear indications of health risks, our government maintains that food with GM content is substantially equivalent to non-GM, therefore labeling is not required.

When GM crops resistant to the weed killer Roundup were introduced,
farmers were promised that one application of the herbicide was all they
would ever need. Dream on. I watch spray rigs running across
neighboring fields from April to November. Roundup is no longer doing
the job; the promise of less chemical application was a false promise.

Some farmers still grow non-GM crops but it is increasingly difficult
to get non-GM seed. If GM pollen contaminates their non-GM crops, it's
their fault their crops got in the way. And of course, since that crop
now has GM genetics, GM kingpin Monsanto et al. can sue them for
stealing patented crop varieties.

Operators
of Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant are having trouble storing a
perpetual accumulation of radioactive cooling water from the plant's
broken reactors, the plant's water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura,
told the Associated Press in an interview this week.

The plant
currently holds 200,000 tonnes of highly contaminated waste water, used
to cool the broken reactors, but operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company,
continues to struggle to find ways to store the toxic substance. TEPCO
has said they are running out of room to build more storage tanks and
the volume of water will more than triple within three years.

"It's
a time-pressing issue because the storage of contaminated water has its
limits, there is only limited storage space," Okamura said.

After
the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe of 2011, the plant's broken reactors
have needed constant cooling and maintenance, including the dumping of
massive amounts of water into the melting reactors -- the only way to
avoid another complete meltdown.

Adding to the excessive amounts
of cooling water is ground water, which continues to leak into the
reactor facilities because of structural damage.

"There are pools
of some 10,000 or 20,000 tonnes of contaminated water in each plant, and
there are many of these, and to bring all these to one place would mean
you would have to treat hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated
water which is mind-blowing in itself," Masashi Goto, nuclear engineer
and college lecturer, stated, adding the problem is a massive public
health concern.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson